"You"ll be able to pick up some wonderful beaten-silver things in San Hermano," Hall said. "I"d be glad to show you around when we get there.
In the meantime, can I get you a drink?"
"I"d love one."
The only drinks for sale in the canteen were cold ginger ale and lemonade. They had the ginger ale, and Hall learned that this was the girl"s first trip out of the United States. "It"s all so different!" she said, and Hall thought he would grimace but then the girl smiled happily and he watched the skin wrinkle faintly at the bridge of her nose and he smiled with her. "You"ll like San Hermano," he said. "And I"d like to show it to you when we get there."
"Did you spend much time there?"
"Only a few days. I took a freighter back from Cairo two years ago and it put in at San Hermano."
"Say, what do you do, anyway?" Jerry asked.
"Don"t sound so surprised. I"m a newspaperman."
"Were you a war correspondent?"
Hall nodded. "I even wrote a book."
Jerry looked into her gla.s.s. "I know it sounds terrible," she said, "but I haven"t read a book in years. Was yours about the war?"
"Let"s talk about it in San Hermano. Do I show you the town?"
"It"s a date."
"That bell is for us," Hall said. "We"d better get back to the plane."
They left the canteen. Ansaldo and Marina were still walking in a slow circle. "Come on," Jerry said. "Meet my boss."
She approached Ansaldo. "Dr. Ansaldo," she said, "I"d like you to meet Mr. Matthew Hall. He"s a newspaperman from the States. And this is Dr.
Marina.
"Mr. Hall is showing me around San Hermano when we get there."
"How nice," Ansaldo said, and from his tone Hall knew that he meant nothing of the sort.
"But now we must hurry," Ansaldo said. "The plane is about to depart."
He took Jerry"s arm and they walked on ahead of Marina and Hall.
"Senor Hall, if you are going to write about the doctor"s forthcoming operation," Marina said, "I would gladly help you. The doctor is the greatest surgeon of our times, perhaps, who knows, of all times. He is magnificent. In his hands, the scalpel is an instrument of divinity. It is more, it is divinity itself. I must tell you the story of the doctor"s greatest operations, although all of them are great. I will help you. You will write a great article about the great operation."
"I am very grateful to you, doctor. I hope that in San Hermano you will have enough time to give me your counsel. After you, doctor." Hall took a last drag at his cigar as Marina climbed the plane ladder.
There was a mountain--the Monte Azul which produced the beans of Androtten"s rhapsodies--and a plateau in the clouds and below the plateau lay the ocean and the city of San Hermano. The lights were going on in the city when Flight Eighteen ended on the airport in the plateau, for the city was five miles farther from the sinking sun of the moment.
On the plateau, the airport lights blended with the brown-orange shades of dusk; in the city the lights cut through the cla.s.sic blackness of night.
A smartly dressed colonel and a top-hatted functionary of the Foreign Office were waiting with two black limousines for the Ansaldo party. The man from the Foreign Office had cleared all the pa.s.sport and customs formalities. Jerry had just enough time to tell Hall that she and the doctors were to stay at the Bolivar before the cars started down the winding hill to San Hermano.
Hall rode to town with the rest of the pa.s.sengers in the sleek Panair bus. He and Androtten were also bound for the Bolivar.
Riding into the valley, the bus descended into the night. It was a night made blacker by the war, as were the nights in San Juan and Havana and New York. San Hermano was the capital of a nation still at peace, but the maws of the war across the seas reached for the oil and coal of the world, and San Hermano could not escape this world. Three lights in every four on the Plaza de la Republica were out, for coal and oil furnished the power for the city"s electricity. Two years earlier, Hall had asked Anibal Tabio why coal and oil had to turn the city"s dynamos when the nation abounded in thousands of mountain streams which could be harnessed by men with slide rules and logarithm tables, and the gentle President had answered him in a sentence. "Because, my dear Hall, San Hermano has been in the twentieth century for barely a decade, while your own nation has been in our century for forty years." And tonight, looking at the ancient Plaza from the window of his room on the third floor of the Bolivar, Hall remembered Tabio"s words with disturbing clarity.
From the balcony of his hotel room, Hall could see both San Hermanos, the Old City and the New. Everyone spoke of the two cities in these terms--the geographers, the tourist guides, the inveterate _Hermanitos_ themselves.
The Old San Hermano had been founded by the Conquistadores in the sixteenth century, a walled speck on the sh.o.r.es of an ocean, a fortress and a thatched church, a handful of flimsy huts. In a century, the thatched church became a proud, gloomy Cathedral; one of the walls was knocked down, and in its place was the cobbled Plaza de Fernando e Isabel. The Plaza was Spain in the New World; opening on to its cobbles stood the huge Moorish stone palaces designed by architects brought over from Seville, the palace of the Captains-General who served as colonial governors, the fortified mint, the Cathedral, the home of the Governor"s elder brother, the Duke of La Runa. Enslaved Indians and later chained Negroes from the African coasts had carried on their backs the square stones Spanish masons cut and formed for the edifices of the Plaza, first the Cathedral, next the Governor"s Palace and the Mint.
Then, in the days of Hidalgo, Bolivar, and San Martin, the ancient Plaza of the Conquistadores became the Plaza de la Republica, and for a few glorious hours the new nation was in tune with its century. But the great Liberators of the times were to die in embittered exile, far from the scenes of their brightest victories. For one swing of the pendulum the liberated lands teetered on the dizzy heights of freedom, and then the pendulum swung back and stopped swinging for a century. The land remained in the hands of the Spanish n.o.bles, and they won their war against the Industrial Revolution, and all that remained of the hour of triumph was the name the Liberators had given the old Plaza and a hollow Republic controlled by the landowners.
In ways more subtle, but no less real than the old ways, the Republic became a colony again, except that the nation was no longer ruled by a crown but by new and even more potent symbols: the sign of the pound, the sign of the dollar, the sign of the franc. The new order brought a new San Hermano, a new Western city built around the rims of the old fortress seaport. It was a strange and often beautiful melange of French villas and British banks and American skysc.r.a.pers and German town houses.
The old Const.i.tution of the Liberators gave way to a series of native dictators who waxed rich as the servants of the foreign owners of the metals and minerals discovered under the nation"s soil, of the foreign business men who never saw San Hermano but built vast abattoirs near the wharves where skinny _Hermanitos_ earned a few pennies a day for slaughtering and then loading endless herds of native cattle in the dark holds of foreign ships.
They were ruthless men, the dictators who sat in San Hermano as pro-Consuls of the foreigners and the landowners, ruthless men who, for their share of the profits of the foreigners, of the endless rivers of pesetas the landowners sent to Spain, maintained armies of cutthroats to put down any attempt at rebellion against the new existing order.
The last of these dictators to sit in San Hermano was General Agusto Segura. More than a decade had pa.s.sed since Segura had died in bed and a junta of professors and miners wrested the control of the nation from Segura"s henchmen. There had been little bloodshed when the Junta took over; after thirty years, the Segura regime, or what was left of it, had just collapsed of its own rottenness.
Hall thought of Segura, and the state he had ruled, and then, again thinking about Tabio while he stared into the shadows of the darkened Plaza de la Republica, Hall remembered Tabio"s quiet remark about his country"s having been in the twentieth century for barely a decade. A slim decade, which began with a world in confusion and was now ending with a world in flames. But if the country weathered these flames, it would be because Tabio, instead of running for the Presidency after the revolution which swept out the remnants of Segurista power, had chosen to serve as Minister of Education for nearly ten years. Hall was willing to stake his life on this, ready to bet that the phenomenal free educational system Tabio had set up for children and adults would, in the final a.n.a.lysis, be one of the nation"s chief bulwarks against fascism.
He changed his clothes and went out for a walk through the crooked streets of Old San Hermano before turning in. Many lights were burning in the fourth floor of the Presidencia, the floor on which the President had his apartment. Military guards were standing listlessly at the entrances to the gilded building.
Hall walked along the Plaza until he came to the Calle de Virtudes, which led to a little cafe on the street opposite the rear entrance of the Presidencia. It had no windows but giant shutters which were folded against the wall when the cafe was open for business. The cafe itself stood on a corner, the sidewalks on both sides of the place covered with tables and chairs. Wooden lattice fences, painted a bright orange, screened the tables from the pedestrian"s section of the sidewalk.
Inside, near the bar itself, two boys with guitars were playing and singing the tragi-comic peasant songs of the south.
He took a sidewalk table, ordered a meat pie and a bottle of beer, and then went to the small hotel next to the cafe to buy a sheet of paper, an envelope, and an air-mail stamp. He asked for a telephone book, looked up the names under Gomez, copied the address of one Juan Gomez, and returned to his table. There he bought a newspaper from a boy peddling the latest edition of the evening. The front page carried a story about Ansaldo: the distinguished visiting medico was to spend the next day conferring with local doctors who had been treating the President. In one of the back pages, under Arrivals, there was a line about the ill.u.s.trious author and war correspondent Dr. M. Gall who reached San Hermano by Clipper; Dr. Gall was the noted author of _The Revenger_, even now being produced in Hollywood.
The paper was put aside for the meat pie. When he was done with the food, Hall pushed his plates away and spread his sheet of lined writing paper on the table before him. He called for some ink, filled his fountain pen, and wrote a letter in Spanish to a "Dear Pedro."
It was a rambling, innocuous letter which started out with family gossip about a forthcoming marriage of a cousin, the marriage prospects of the writer"s eligible daughter, the letter received from Cousin Hernando who was happy on his new ranch and whose good wife was expecting another child soon. Then the letter went on to say that "I suppose you have read in the Havana papers that our President is ailing. Today there arrived in our city the distinguished Spanish doctor Varela Ansaldo. He is to treat the President. Perhaps I am very stupid, but is he not the surgeon who operated so well on the throat of your dear Uncle Carlos?" The letter then continued on for another page of family gossip and regards and requests that Pedro embrace a whole list of dear cousins and aunts.
It was signed, simply, "Juanito."
Hall read the letter twice, sealed it, and addressed the envelope to Pedro de Aragon, Apartado 1724, La Habana, Cuba. Pedro de Aragon was a myth. Mail at this box was picked up by Santiago Iglesias, an officer of the Spanish Republican Army whom Hall had met again in Havana. Iglesias did at one time have an uncle named Carlos; the uncle had died on the Jarama front from a fascist bullet that tore through his throat and killed him instantly. Hall had arranged to write to Iglesias under names chosen from the phone books of different cities if the need arose. He scribbled the name and address of Juan Gomez on the back of the envelope, left some money on the table, and walked back to the Plaza.
There he dropped the letter in a mailbox and continued on his way to the Bolivar.
There was a new clerk on duty when Hall reached the hotel, a wiry man of forty-odd whose yellow silk shirt clashed with both his black mohair jacket and his long, lined face. Hall asked for the key to Room 306 in Spanish.
The clerk cleared his throat and answered in English. "There was messages," he said, handing the key to Hall with a sheaf of slips. "And also this." From under the counter he drew a sealed letter written on heavy paper and bearing the neat blue imprint of the American Emba.s.sy at San Hermano on the envelope.
Hall frowned and tore open the envelope.
"Senorita the Amba.s.sador"s daughter telephoned twice," the clerk said.
"Thank you."
"It"s on this slip, Mr. Hall."
"Thanks again." He read the few handwritten lines of the letter. It was an invitation from the Amba.s.sador"s daughter, Margaret Skidmore, to attend the Amba.s.sador"s party at the Emba.s.sy on the 5th. That was two nights off.
There was a message from Jerry Olmstead. She had phoned from her room to leave word that she had retired for the evening but would meet him in the dining room at ten for breakfast. Hall noticed that the clerk was watching him intently as he read the girl"s message, but when he started to read the next slip the clerk interrupted him.